#radicaljoy

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT SERIES : JULY

Radical Joy – Brisa Areli Muñoz (‘13) on Pedagogy, The Public, and Applied Theatre

Interview by Michael Wilson (’11)

Brisa Areli Muñoz co-created Thirteen O’Clock Theatre in South Texas in 2008 and moved to New York for the MA in Applied Theatre in 2011. She served as an Associate Program Director at the CUNY Creative Arts Team and took courses in Organizational Change Management at The New School, on her way to The Public.

Let’s start with a theatrical moment that just won’t leave your imagination, from anytime in your life. What comes to mind?

Ooh, that’s good. I worked on this project called the Food Project in 2014, in collaboration with company members from Thirteen O’Clock Theatre. The Food Project was inspired by a Washington Post article “Too Much of Too Little” by Eli Saslow. This piece cited the Rio Grande Valley as the poorest and fattest place in the nation. Our original participatory production sought to explore the circumstances that contribute to these statistics through conversation with audiences and the expertise of stakeholders in the region such as farmers, doctors, economists, health practitioners, and artists.

In one scene entitled “Food Medley” actors performed 1-minute original songs comically depicting their personal relationships to food. Afterwards, these same actors broke out into the audience to have small group discussions. Audience members were sitting at picnic tables, and actors asked them to look at the “menu” in front of them, a piece of paper with a plate, knife, and fork drawn on it.  “Draw what you eat on a weekly basis on the inside your plate, and on the outside of your plate, write what circumstances lead you to select those food options.” A son and a mother got into a private conversation about why pizza was on both of their plates. The young son, who must have been six, said, “mom you always get pizza but my school says you should eat greens too.” And the mom turned to the son and said, “I only get you pizza because it’s the only place that I have time to stop by between my jobs when I pick you up from school.” And then, of course, as an attempt to comfort her he says, “it’s okay mommy, I like pizza, I like it.” But then she turned to him and said, “no, thank you for telling me. I’m gonna think about where else we can get you food.” Unfortunately the reality is, in many situations, access to fresh food is not easy, hence the reason we sought to provoke conversation and mobilize action through this event where food was provided and programming was free. But that was it. Those totally human moments of discovery are theatre, aren’t they? Theatre is just a representation of humanity…it’s a recreation of humanity.

And what are you doing at The Public Theater?

I’m in a program called Public Works, as Manager of Community Partnerships. The program partners with organizations across the city, to bring people together to build theatre capacities. We work with Military Resilience Foundation—so with veterans—with elders at Brownsville Recreation Center, Fortune Society, we work with Dreamyard up in the Bronx, Domestic Workers United…I support the teaching artists and the curriculums they’re building, and, as a teaching artist, I teach the intergenerational class, at the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park.

There’s a culture that’s a part of the program: the “spirit”, as I’ve been best able to name it, is that of radical joy. Systems of oppression are so alive in the experiences of so many people living in New York. Public Works attempts to create the space where we can simply be in community with each other and be joyous and make theatre together, and really be recognized by an institution, The Public, for the value that each of these members brings.

So that is radical.

It is. And I don’t experience those spaces very often. I used to think you couldn’t get to the joy without working through the pain. And what I’ve been able to see is that if you put joy at the center, that’s a way into the pain that’s not about having to move through it.

Would you tell me a story that gets at that joy you’re talking about?

Absolutely! This intergenerational class is a great example. We have a mix of English, Spanish, and Mandarin speakers in this group, and we have all ages: our youngest member is five—Aiden, he is INCREDIBLE.

On session eighteen of twenty, I sent them away to devise, in their age groups. The most theatrically exciting piece was from the group that had straddled between nine and eleven, in their corner doing their thing…and Aiden, the five-year-old. They were sneaking in the night to get the cookie jar. You see them in the dark creeping toward something. Then the light turns on and they get super scared and someone playing the mom voice is like, “what are you doing down there?” They’re like, “NOTHING!” She falls back asleep, then they chant, “cookies, cookies, cookies, cookies!” They get to the cookie jar, but then it’s twenty feet tall, so they pile on top of each other and put the five-year-old on top, and reach for the cookie. It was so fun to watch because they were playing with levels, with scale, with character, with storytelling, with all of it.

They so naturally understood how to make exciting theatre, all on their own—I was just there to make sure they didn’t fall. Meeting every week and creating from their mind builds their capacity to do this work. It’s not about that I’d taught them anything, but that I put the framework out there for them to create within. This is what freedom looks like: chaos. You know what I mean? Utter chaos. And joy, and energy, and commitment. Everyone committed to making a piece of theatre.

You talked about this as radical joy, and you talked about going to the joy first, and, what you just described has analogies to politics. Sneaking in perilous situations to get to the cookie jar…

Brisa: 100%. The one that the 8-year-olds did took place at the Statue of Liberty, and they decided that they were in prison and one of them had escaped. People who were standing around, pedestrians at the statue of liberty, saw that the cops were looking for them, and decided that they would hide them. It was this joyous, “COME HERE! WE’LL HIDE YOU!” And they hide behind one of them, or hide behind a chair. Meanwhile, this little girl is standing on a stool holding herself up like the statue of liberty the whole time, kind of watching it all. You know what I mean?

It’s symbolic, and resonant of immigration. And what you just described goes back to pedagogy. This was successful because you created structures for them to create inside, whatever—

—whatever they wanted it to be. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I had such a great learning experience in the MA program. I came at a time when I was so young…I mean, I still am…but I was 22! And I had come from an organizing background. My whole time in the MA in applied theatre, it was theory, me trying to wrap my head around the theory, not recognizing the ways I was already doing it in practice. And so I’m finally at the point, now, eight years after I first entered, where I see they’re in conversation with each other. It’s no longer just theory. It’s my practice.

You love to create the opportunity to pause, assess what’s going on, individually, in a community, in society, and then choose possibilities, new actions—